By Bill Federman, Commentary

Published 4:28 pm, Thursday, August 14, 2014

State prisoner executions have gotten a lot of bad press lately. Prison officials who have access to money and technology seem to be unable to do to death-row inmates what destitute, addled addicts do every day — kill themselves by injecting drugs.

Reading about botched executions by injection is enough to make a person think there might be a better way for society to exact revenge for especially heinous crimes. Indeed, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — who ought to know — recently told The Associated Press that he thinks a firing squad is a more humane and efficient way of dispatching the condemned. And he's not alone.

Recent execution-by-injection snafus suggest that Kozinski is right. According to AP reports, an Arizona inmate took nearly two hours of gasping and snorting to die in July; in April, a prisoner in Oklahoma went into convulsions and finally died of a heart attack; a January execution in Ohio took 26 minutes to kill an inmate; and so on.

I'm fully locked and loaded on this idea, for a number of reasons. Death by bullet is quicker and more certain than drug executions — a mistake in dosage is impossible — and it has other advantages. It's a method that has been used for centuries and has a documented history of effectiveness; it is more dignified, some feel, than being strapped to a table and injected with drugs that slowly drain the condemned person's life, often, as we have seen, causing convulsions before death; being fatally shot is quicker and can be less painful than an injection gone bad; and firing-squad executions are cheaper, which will appeal to foes of government spending.

Guns and bullets are far more readily available than the expensive death-chamber drugs currently in use that are often in short supply. In the more primitive parts of the country, where guns are thought to be essential to daily life, ammunition and military-style weapons coveted by the heat-packing loonies who increasingly roam their streets are easier to find than a coherent thought. Supply, unfortunately, is not an issue.

But I'm a pretty positive person and it's not my style to take unprovoked verbal potshots at this country's demented gun culture and the unhinged yahoos who think there are no limits to gun ownership, display and use. Speaking reason to those incapable of reasoning (I'm looking at you, Wayne LaPierre) will have to wait for the next massacre aided and abetted by the gun lobby's fight against common-sense gun laws.

Rather, I'm puzzled as to why state executions can't be carried out in a competent manner. A veterinarian can euthanize a beloved pet with no trouble, but state-sponsored killings carried out according to strict protocols can't seem to be done efficiently. Why?

It's baffling. But here's a better question: Why keep trying to execute criminals? Killing to exact revenge — which is what state-sponsored executions in effect do — is a sign of a morally and intellectually inferior society. A society that kills to punish crimes fails its citizens and itself and forfeits any claim to being truly civilized. Executions have nothing to do with justice and, more to the point, have no deterrent effect on criminal activity, which may be why the United States is one of the few countries in the world to carry them out.

Executing criminals is, in my mind, linked to the unfettered use and ownership of guns in that both are relics of a less-developed, less civilized time. As humans and societies evolve, responses to abnormal behavior — in the case of executions — and to changes in the definition of personal freedom for the common good — as in gun control — must also evolve. To willfully refuse to do so is a national disgrace.

I have a well-developed sense of vengeance, which I try to keep under control, and I haven't yet shed any tears over an execution for a brutal act of violence. But I try rise above my many baser instincts, especially in matters of life and death. It's a struggle that I believe will ultimately make me a better person.

It's no longer high noon in this country, there is no more frontier, and the concept of frontier justice died long ago. It's time to bury it and its attendant Wild West mentality.